Episode Details

If your livelihood depends on your ability to be creative and generate ideas, you don’t have the luxury of wasting precious mental energy and focus on meaningless tasks, busy work, and constant interruptions. You can’t just “punch the time clock” at 5pm, you work until the job is done. And how you budget your mental energy and focus determines whether or not you’re leaving at a decent hour or chronically putting in late nights fueled by Red Bull and Chinese takeout. If you’re tired of spinning your wheels all day doing “stuff” yet you feel like you never actually accomplish anything, before searching for the next productivity app or time management hack, ask yourself these five questions first:

• How distracted are you during a regular workday?
• How accommodating are you to the “urgent” needs of others?
• How accommodating are you to your own “urgent” needs?
• Have you clearly defined WHY your next action is truly important?
• Are you 100% confident your next action is even the right action?

I was recently chatting with a private coaching client about time management, and she shared with me that her greatest struggle is prioritizing what needs to get done during any given workday. She laid out with me no less than seven huge projects she was contemplating starting or already working on, and she felt frazzled trying to juggle all of the different tasks and goals. Being an ambitious “creative,” she had a tendency towards being distracted easily (Squirrel!!!!), and she would often procrastinate and end up getting nothing done at all. This led to guilt, self-loathing, and unfortunately even a divorce due to all of the unfulfilled promises in her relationship. Her current solution to staying focused was creating an accountability system whereby she would keep track of all the tasks she completed during the day and then email it to someone to prove that she had a productive day and didn’t waste her time. My question to her was: “Does a long list of completed tasks prove that you’ve gotten anything meaningful done during your day?” Silence.

The ‘Theater of Work’

For tens of thousands of years mankind has simply lived in survival mode. There was no such thing as a “schedule,” we worked according to our needs.

Food? Check. Water? Check. Shelter? Check.

Then as culture became more civilized and we became farmers and specialists, it was a matter of working until the job was done.

Are the fences built? Check. Animals fed? Check. Horses shod? Check.

It wasn’t until the industrialization of our society in the 19th century that we began measuring “output” and working year-round for a specified number of hours per day and weeks per year. The term productivity was only first used in an economic sense starting in 1899, defined as “rate of output per unit.”

Made the maximum number of widgets in forty hours per week? Check.

Fast-forward to today and we’ve been conditioned to believe that we must look busy every single minute of the day in order to “appear” productive. God forbid our boss walks by and we’re smiling, laughing, or chatting with a co-worker. Or imagine the sheer horror of our boss looking for us and we’re not even in our office because we’ve taken a quick walk around the block to clear our heads and solve a creative problem (but it’s more than okay to take five smoke breaks per day?). To avoid the embarrassment or outright fear of getting reprimanded for not being “busy,” we’ve conditioned ourselves to constantly be doing something...anything...so it appears as if we’re getting things done.

Looked busy while making widgets for forty (to eighty) hours per week?